There were many in the same boat and by now, six years after the end of the war which put them there, one was beginning to see distinct patterns in how these poor girls responded to their fates. Some simply married the first male creature to come into view and so joined the rest of us in the great lottery of life. Others dedicated themselves to the memory of their lost loves and let the rest of the world grow indistinct. Yet others railed at their misfortune, turned bitter and sneered at anyone who had what they lacked, pretending not to care, not to grieve, hardly to feel, and I usually thought these the saddest of all. Lorna was threatening to make me change my mind, however, for her path it seemed to me now was even more painful to witness. She was one who would hope and hope and fade, quite out in the open for all to see, causing friends and kind strangers to plot matches for her and crueller types to pity and, in the end, despise her for her sadness and her helpless longing. Oh dear, I thought again, and I smiled at her father who smiled back and might well have been thinking ‘Oh dear’ himself.
Then I told myself sternly that I was not here to comfort and befriend poor Lorna, and that, although I should certainly ask Hugh if there were any young men of good prospect lurking around Gilverton who seemed not to be finding our own collection of poor Lornas to their liking, this evening I had to harden my heart and not allow myself to be sidetracked, for there was still much to be learned.
My introduction to the case, after all, that day in my sitting room at Gilverton had necessarily been rather short what with Hugh and the coffee tray waiting.
‘There is an unfortunate state of affairs developing at Luckenlaw, my dear Mrs Gilver,’ Mr Tait had begun, ‘and although it is too far advanced for it to be nipped in the bud exactly, I think we could still weed out the pest before it sets seed.’ Long years with Hugh had equipped me ably to handle any horticultural metaphor and I nodded, encouraging him to go on. ‘It started in the spring,’ he said, ‘and at first it was rather worrying. A dairy maid from a local farm arrived home one evening with a tale of being set upon in the lane. She wasn’t hurt, but she was very badly shaken. Naturally the police were summoned and they, along with the men of the village and the neighbouring farms, searched high and low for the rascal but found nothing. As the days and weeks passed, the girl put the nasty experience behind her like a good sensible lass and no more was thought of it until it happened again. A different girl, the same story, another search and no one to be found. The third time it happened the police went through the motions, as they must, but with no great hopes of catching him, and that’s when people started wondering aloud whether there was really anything in it. Some of the details of these attacks were extremely fanciful, you see, and the sergeant told me that it wasn’t the first time they had wasted a lot of effort on girls’ silly nonsense, nor would it be the last. I preached a good stiff sermon on as near a topic to wasting police time as I could find in scripture’ – here I could not help a chirp of laughter and I longed to ask Mr Tait for chapter and verse – ‘and that seemed to do the trick, for a while. But now it’s started again. And it’s not silly girls any more, Mrs Gilver, anything but. Farmers’ wives, sensible married types with children of their own, women I’ve known for years to be steady and down-to-earth, women who would no more make mischief with a lot of silly tattle than they would…’ He took a deep breath before starting again. ‘Now, as you can imagine there are all sorts of rumours and fantastical stories flying around and I’m afraid that it’s beginning to be spoken of outside the village. Lorna, my daughter, told me that it came back to her from a friend she has down in Earlsferry, five miles away. No details and Luckenlaw was not mentioned by name thankfully – that’s the last thing we need – just a tale that there was a “dark stranger” roaming the hills in Fife and grabbing girls who were out alone at night.’
‘Grabbing them?’ I asked.
‘You see!’ cried Mr Tait. ‘Already it’s getting worse in the telling. The girls – if there’s any truth to the tale at all – are certainly not being “grabbed”. They’re not really being harmed at all. Just waylaid. And frightened.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said.
‘And while it’s bad enough to think that a Luckenlaw man could be doing it,’ said Mr Tait, ‘someone I see from the pulpit every Sunday, someone perhaps that I’ve christened and married myself, at least that could happen anywhere. The alternative – that the women are making it up – is much worse.’
‘And so you would like me to speak to them?’ I said.
‘My dear, if you would,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I would hate to see Luckenlaw get a name for this kind of thing.’
‘You’ve grown fond of the place then?’ I said. ‘It always seems rather brutal to me the way a minister is just landed in a parish and must make a home there come what may. I’m glad you’ve been “lucky” at Luckenlaw.’
‘Oh no, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mr Tait. ‘You are quite wrong on both counts. At least, my dear late wife was a Luckenlaw girl – she grew up on a farm there – and the village took me quite to its heart because of that. And the name of the place has nothing to do with luck. But there, you’re English. You’d hardly know.’
I tried to look interested in the history lesson I felt sure was on its way.
‘It’s a common mistake,’ he continued, ‘but actually the Lucken Law gets its name the same way as the old luckenbooths did.’
‘Luckenbooths?’ I echoed.
‘Silversmiths’ shops,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Literally locked booths. Locked up because of their precious contents. Likewise the Lucken Law: the locked hill. That is to say, containing a sealed chamber. You find them throughout Scotland. Hard to know what they were originally used for: hiding places; ancient ceremonies, perhaps. Certainly, there were burials for a time in the Luckenlaw chamber.’ And then, amazingly, he stopped as though the subject were at an end. It was the shortest lesson on the thrilling history of ancient Scotland I had ever encountered and surprised gratitude spurred me on to speak.
‘Very well then,’ I said to him, ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘And I hear that your best is very good indeed.’
I should not say I was an excessively modest woman, and certainly not one who cannot bear to be complimented when compliments are due – I have always felt that to rebuff perfectly reasonable praise is churlish and, in its way, more demanding than simple thanks would be: one forces the giver into much greater efforts at subtlety and evidence than most casual admirers would care to take, for one thing. At the current moment, however, I felt I really had to speak. It would be better to set matters straight from the outset than to waft along on undeserved praise and disappoint him in the end.
‘I have to say, Mr Tait,’ I began, ‘that I have no great expectations about solving this for you. If it’s a mare’s nest I doubt whether anyone knows who started it, much less why. These things do tend to take on a life of their own. Look at the Loch Ness Monster, for instance. Whose fault is that? And even if the dark stranger exists, if no one knows what he looks like then catching him at it seems the only hope, and unless we can discover some kind of a pattern to the thing, we won’t know where to look. So, please, be sure that I will do my best but do not, I beg you, get your hopes up.’
Mr Tait nodded and appeared to take my protestations to heart.
‘Like you,’ he said, ‘I don’t know whether to hope that he exists or not for each possibility is as unappealing as the other. But as to a pattern, that’s very clear. Didn’t I tell you? It’s the SWRI that’s the pattern, my dear. It always happens after one of their meetings. That’s half the trouble. It always happens on a night when just about every man in the place is on his own and no wife to say where he’s been. It always happens on a night where almost every woman is out walking in the dark, when the very best of them might fall prey to fancy.’